


"Just Another Day in Paradise"

by Princess of Geeks (Princess)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Set during Stargate: Universe, fic as meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 16:14:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1694498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princess/pseuds/Princess%20of%20Geeks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is for the 2012 Jack/Daniel Ficathon, on Dreamwidth and Livejournal. </p><p> </p><p>I was a pinch hitter for the ficathon mistress, the lovely and talented <span class="ljuser"></span><a href="http://melayneseahawk.dreamwidth.org/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://melayneseahawk.dreamwidth.org/"></a><b>melayneseahawk</b>. Her prompt: "Bottom!Jack, NC 17, happy ending, post-series."</p><p>:)</p><p>Was this prompt tailor made for me or what?</p><p>So, what did I do? This fic is an episode tag for StarGate:Universe: "Subversion," Season 1 Episode 18. (Aired 2010.) I tried to include enough subtle exposition to make it comprehensible even if you haven't seen that episode. This fic also assumes Season 10 of SG-1 happened in 2006, per the awesome Arduinna's website.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Just Another Day in Paradise"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MelayneSeahawk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelayneSeahawk/gifts).



When Jack got home, just as dusk was sending gray fingers across the high coastal clouds, he was still a bit disoriented from his turn inhabiting the body of a Marine corporal assigned to a half-alive ship in a distant galaxy. The experience gave him a whole new respect for Daniel's venture via those same damned stones into the Ori galaxy with Vala Mal Doran, a couple of years back. And, it created unpleasant echoes of his own earlier inadvertent intrusion into the life of Joe and Charlene Spencer. Damn those Ancients, anyway. What good had they ever done, really?

But that was always an unproductive train of thought.

The townhouse felt empty, uninhabited, so he shed his jacket in the front hall and loosened his collar and kept going, back and out. He found Daniel on the patio, sprawled in a lounge chair, contemplating the back fence. Uncharacteristically, Daniel had cracked open the bourbon. The good stuff, the Blanton's, that Cassie had sent them last Christmas. Even though their last bottle had still had two inches in it. They always kept some on hand, restocked sometimes by Cassie, sometimes by Carter, but they didn't drink it in the ordinary run of things. It was for marking occasions, reserved for the family toast on Fraiser's birthday, and other ceremonies.

Apparently tonight was ceremonial.

Daniel wasn't drunk, Jack was glad to see. A quick calculation of the level of bronze, sunset-lit liquid in the bottle, compared to what was still in Daniel's glass, told him that.

Daniel had apparently poured a double shot to keep him company during his vigil. Because once again, Daniel had been waiting. And he hated waiting more than just about anything.

Well, just for today he had been waiting. Yesterday, he had been in action.

Yesterday, he had, at Jack's order, taken the lead on the secret op of tailing Rush in Telford's body, taking point for the double team of SWAT troops. And it had gone rather badly. Much worse than they'd hoped. Jack knew without having to be told, without even having to see the alcoholic evidence, that that perceived personal failure was weighing on Daniel -- being unable to stop the Lucian cell from escaping with their man. _"We're too late,"_ Daniel had said, over Jack's radio.

Being too late to save someone was kind of Daniel's most hated thing ever.

Daniel had poured the Blanton's neat. Or, perhaps he'd put an ice cube in his glass an hour ago and it had already melted. Besides noting his drink, Jack noted that Daniel was dressed today in extremely casual civvies, as he'd been yesterday, and he had his feet up and his head back, the leather jacket he favored these days carelessly slung in the chair seat beside him. Jack was secretly happy to see how often Daniel wore that jacket. Jack had given it to him a couple of birthdays ago, when the shearling coat he'd brought back from Tegalus had finally worn so thin that even Daniel had ruefully declared it retired, and had hung it up for the last time, instead of continuing to wear it and risk breaking through the elbows or cracking the shoulders. But that old coat carried too many memories to throw away. It was hanging up, shrouded in plastic, guarded by mothballs, in their bedroom closet.

Daniel preferred old things, even now.

Jack picked up Daniel's current leather jacket and hung it on the empty chair's back, then sank down carefully. The wooden slats creaked as he leaned back, crushing the jacket's lapels against his shoulder blades. There wasn't much of a breeze this evening, but what there was, was cool and smelled of cut grass.

_Old things. When was the last time Daniel had his hands in the dirt? When was the last time he felt like an archaeologist and not a bureaucrat? Yesterday he'd felt like a soldier, or a spy. Was that better, by Daniel's standards? Had to be a step up from paper pusher, at least._

Jack unfolded his arms and glanced at the little table between the two chairs. Just the corked bottle of Blanton's; no second glass. Without a word, Daniel, not looking at him, still squinting at the fence in the fading orange light, held out his.

Jack took it and raised it wordlessly. To Janet? Or to Rush, wherever he was? Unclear. But he owed someone a salute. He took a sip. There had indeed been an ice cube, now vanished. The expensive bourbon went down cold and smooth. Jack sighed. Daniel emitted a barely audible chuckle, soaked in irony.

Small indulgences, balanced against great injustices.

"You know," Jack said, moved, husband-like, to recap his shitty day and his own assignment in this shitty mission, "I didn't authorize Colonel Young to torture Telford in Rush's body just for the hell of it -- just because Young has a grudge against Telford and I was willing to indulge him."

"I know," Daniel said, his profile to Jack, speaking into the liquid orange light.

"And I certainly didn't do it because I thought that was, or ever is, a legitimate way to gain intel."

"I know," Daniel said again, with the identical flat inflection.

Daniel held out his hand for the bourbon. When Jack gave it back to him, he took a bigger slug than either of them had so far, and then set the square, short glass on the little table between them. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then put his glasses back on. Jack wasn't sure if his ten-day growth of soft stubble was a thing, or a sign that he was simply extremely distracted by recent events on the _Destiny_. They kept such different hours. Jack wasn't always here in the morning when Daniel got up. Daniel was often gone late into the night, managing his own department in his own way.

"Is it me you're telling this stuff to? Or are you telling it to yourself?" Daniel asked the fence.

Jack shook his head, and spoke deliberately and slow. "I did it because I knew that some kind of extreme physical deprivation was the only way to break the brainwashing, if--"

"--if Telford was under the influence of the same thing we saw Teal'c go through, ten years ago. No, nine," Daniel finished for him. "I know."

"Just so you know."

"Yeah."

Daniel picked up the glass again and took a mouthful. Jack watched him hold it, tasting, not swallowing, with never a wince as he set down the glass. He turned toward Jack, leaned a little, to reach over to the table. Which made it so easy for Jack to bring his hand up -- it was hardly any distance to cover -- and cup it close against the back of Daniel's skull, to hold his head still as Jack leaned in, tilted his own head, and brought their mouths together.

Daniel wanted to smile, but he had to swallow first, so Jack's lips got the combined mobile confusion of those two actions. And then a lovely aftertaste of sharp, sweet liquor as their mouths connected, then opened and softened, joining them in something leisurely and intimate and reassuring. Something Jack never took for granted -- not on a day like today, and not on any of the more mundane, boring kinds of days that had extended back for a few months since the hotter of the alien wars had gone colder.

The Lucian Alliance was not a pushover kind of enemy, but Earth had faced worse.

Jack didn't want to think about the Lucian Alliance right now. Or Rush. Or Telford. Because, this. This was the realest thing in Jack's world. This man, their life, this home, these warm lips, this wet mouth.

When he pulled back, breaking the kiss to meet Daniel's eyes, he realized that Daniel had brought a hand against Jack's head too, mirroring Jack's gesture.

"Thanks for listening," Jack said, mock serious.

Daniel grinned at him, crinkling up his eyes, showing off all his crow's feet. "Thanks for coming home early tonight. I needed to see you."

"Yeah," Jack said, smiling in his turn. "I know."

"Okay, enough with the 'I know's,' " Daniel insisted, crinkling even more.

"You started--"

Daniel cut him off by kissing him more thoroughly, more intensely, putting his two hands against Jack's jaw, diving into Jack's willing mouth as if he wished he could stay there, blot out the day with touch, with sensation, with ... love.

Come to think of it....

"Okay," Jack said, breathing hard, hardening in his trousers, leaning back from Daniel's mouth only because it would get him more of what he wanted, sooner. "Okay, stop it. Inside. Now."

Daniel laughed outright. Smoothing the frown from his forehead, making that supercharged brain shift gears into amusement, was worth all the effort Jack sometimes had to put into clowning.

"Before dinner?" Daniel said, pretending outrage.

"Damn straight," Jack said, and immediately followed that with, "Don't say it."

He shoved Daniel's shoulder, to get him moving, and got up himself, hooking two fingers in the collar of Daniel's jacket, and unbuttoning his shirt one-handed even before he was inside the kitchen.

Down the hall, past the bathroom, into the bedroom. Daniel's coat on the bureau top. Shirt, undershirt, slacks with their jingling pockets and belt, shorts, all off, all on the floor. One bounce on the firm mattress, and he turned, getting to see Daniel, his face naked first, pull off his henley, undo his jeans, and then sit, his bare back to Jack, to unlace his boots.

Jack scooted closer and put a hand on Daniel's spine.

"What made you call me out for the surveillance yesterday?"

"I don't know; it seemed like the obvious choice."

"Why?"

Daniel was lying on the bed now, his feet bare, pushing down his jeans and his boxers. Jack distracted him by putting a hand on his dick before he had his jeans off his shins. Daniel stilled instantly at the touch, all his focus there. His eyes fell shut, but Jack could see he was still listening.

"Need for secrecy, need to go outside the chain, because something was fucked up inside that already fucked up command, if you can even call it that... You're the obvious choice on short notice for something like that."

Jack's hand was stroking up and down, slowly and firmly, just like Daniel liked -- dragging a little, the friction a feature and not a drawback of the hasty move to sex. Daniel made a noise in his throat, brief and reluctant sounding, but Jack knew better. He kept his hand moving. Daniel was firming fast, and even three-quarters hard, his dick was already welling. Jack scooped up the slick without breaking his rhythm, and kept his hand moving, wetting Daniel's shaft and head with his own pre-come, gripping a little harder as the friction decreased. Daniel arched his back, just a little, digging his heels into the bed.

"I'm not military."

"Yes you are. Your rank is Captain Obvious."

Score. He made Daniel laugh again. He grinned into the semi-darkness. He knew, even though Daniel had not said it yet and might not say it out loud at all, that the failure of today felt heavy. Heavy enough to force Daniel to invoke Janet's memory to help him keep his guilt reflex proportional. Daniel had needed that tangible reminder, the clink of the ice, the taste in his mouth, a memory both bitter and sweet. Just as he and Jack used each other's physical touch sometimes, to deflect the ghosts of other past failures. Those ghosts could crowd a person, when the night was dark and the house was empty.

Something Jack knew a bit about, himself.

He leaned closer, wanting to soak up Daniel's expression, his closed eyes, his intent face, his inward-focused smile, the way he licked his lips when Jack's hand closed around the crown of his cock and squeezed just.... there.

Jack leaned in, wanting, needing, to taste that delicious mouth. Daniel opened to him readily, like he always did, like he always had. Yeah. Nothing about this could ever be ordinary, expected, entitled, for Jack.

He found himself pressing closer as he kept his hand moving, kept the kiss going, pressing his slower but still eager erection to Daniel's thigh and hip. Found himself half atop Daniel, chest to chest, squeezing now as he stripped Daniel's cock, loving how Daniel's hands came around his back, how Daniel arched against him.

Found himself laughing as Daniel used the embrace as misdirection, swiftly hooking a heel around Jack's calf and turning them, smoothly transferring his weight to an elbow and levering on top with a minimum of effort.

"Gotcha," Daniel laughed, breathing it into Jack's ear.

Jack tapped on the mattress with his free palm, as if they were wrestling. He was still grinning. "I give," he said, arching up into Daniel's heavy pelvis. "You got me."

Daniel stopped at that, bracing himself on his hands and searching Jack's face like he couldn't quite believe what he had just heard.

"Come on," Jack said, hitching upward a little in the bed, pushing against Daniel's weight, though they were in a pretty good spot already. Daniel's practiced flip had lined them up, both now-erect dicks side by side and pressing together, making an epicenter of heat as compelling in its red-orange smolder as the sunset outside. He spread his legs, letting Daniel's thighs fall inside his. "Take it."

Daniel smiled, feral and sweet, only partly an act, and he bent his head and set his teeth to Jack's shoulder. Jack groaned and clutched at his back, fire running up his spine and down his legs.

Were they acting? Enacting? How much of this was comfort, how much was ritual, how much was need? No way to say. The absoluteness of the trust they had in each other, in the depth and width of their reliance on each other, after these many years of struggle and comfort, gave them all the leeway they needed for this. It might be symbol, it might be reality. But Jack didn't have to analyze anything, or ask Daniel to, to accept that tonight, Daniel topping him might have some meaning.

It might be a way for Daniel to get back a measure of control, after yesterday, because what was failure, in truth, but a loss of control, an insult to the ego?

It might be a way to let Daniel feel reassured that, although Jack had given the order that had scrambled him and the other SWAT team members into the field, fruitlessly staging at that abandoned dockside, only to be defeated by superior technology and a superior plan, Daniel wasn't in fact a mindless drone -- a low-level soldier doomed to carry out orders regardless.

It might be Daniel's way of comforting himself, something both more and less symbolic and primal than the week's events suggested. Simply an uncalculated impulse that expressed something basic about the fact that Daniel was male.

But that was several scenarios too many. Despite his training in strategic thinking, Jack was the last person to try overanalyze their sex life. They had one; that was its own reward and its own justification. Always.

But whatever the reason, it was becoming increasingly clear that Daniel was on track to top him tonight, and soon, which wasn't all that frequent in their relationship, but which was fine with Jack all the same. Tonight, or any night.

"Whatever you want," he breathed, which was also something that was true, and that he and Daniel both knew, but which, like his reason for letting Young unleash on Rush/Telford, it didn't hurt to speak aloud.

"God," Daniel breathed, and he let his weight sink into Jack, and then he gave a push with his pelvis, driving his weight inward and down, creating a burst of delicious friction along both their lengths.

He kissed Jack's neck, giving him some more teeth, pressing his tongue against the beating artery, and then he put more of his weight on his hands and eased down, kissing all the way, kissing the trail of hair that was grayer every year than Jack's vanity allowed, kissing his belly, softer this year than Jack wanted to admit, until he folded down over his own knees and pulled Jack's cock into his mouth.

Just like Daniel, Jack's very own personal contrarian, to start out to top Jack by going down on him.

Was Jack complaining? No.

Jack groaned his pleasure and put his hands in Daniel's hair, combing the thick short strands. Then he slid his right hand around and down to scratch at Daniel's soft beard and run his thumb along Daniel's lip where it met his shaft.

Long familiarity gave their rhythm an ease, an instantaneous groove. Jack fucked gently upward; Daniel gently bobbed his head and sucked, and all thought fled as Jack lost himself in the warm curves and slickness of Daniel's experienced mouth. He let words come out as they would, not holding back, not any more. Hard to believe he'd had to hold back for so long. Those days of restraint and tension and worry and uncertainty were only a distant memory now.

How could he do what he did, these days, without Daniel at his back? Inconceivable.

"Daniel....

"God....

"Yeah, baby, yeah...."

He didn't worry, any more, about how he sounded in bed. How he sounded to Daniel's ears; if he said the things Daniel wanted to hear. He just enjoyed the moment.

Daniel seemed to be taking his time at first, savoring the taste and weight, licking and sucking more than fucking Jack with his mouth. But his movements imperceptibly segued into serious motion, all tight lips and soft palate. Jack quit making words. He groaned and squeezed Daniel's shoulders, letting his own hips move, building toward orgasm.

After a while, he felt Daniel smile. Daniel's rhythm slowed, and his hands clamped on Jack's hips, squeezing and pressing and interrupting Jack's rocking. Jack opened his eyes and lifted his head off the pillow. As Daniel slowly, lingeringly pulled off him, Jack cupped his head, his ear, petting, trailing warm fingers over his nape. When Daniel smiled up at him, it was breathtaking.

When Daniel knelt up and reached for the bedside drawer, Jack tugged the other pillow down toward his midsection. Daniel pulled and he pushed, settling it under Jack's hips.

Daniel's eyebrow asked, _"On your back like this?_ ", and Jack simply smiled. He bent one knee, let the other fall aside, and spread his arms on the mattress.

Daniel shook his head. "I keep thinking I'll get used to this particular position, but I don't think I ever will."

"So that's your secret reason for not fucking me so much. For doing other things in bed."

"Things that aren't this," Daniel said, hooking an arm under Jack's offered knee and moving it, and at the same time leaning, angling Jack's hips, supported by the pillow, to where he wanted them. He held out his free hand and transferred the cool handful of lube to Jack's palm.

"Keeping it... fresh," Jack said.

Holding Daniel's gaze, Jack reached between them and slicked him up with a corkscrewing motion. He loved that moment of the first contact of his slick fingers with Daniel's cockhead -- the minute wince, the way Daniel's lips parted as his eyes fell shut. Jack wiped his hand on the sheet without looking away from Daniel's face, and gripped Daniel's shoulder.

He lifted his chin as Daniel seated himself and began to gently push.

It was slow, and relentless, and tight, and oh so gentle. When Daniel's weight had shifted forward enough, he lifted his other foot, wrapping around Daniel's knee.

Daniel's face was buried in his shoulder again, Daniel's breath coming fast now, moist and hot against Jack's skin.

Daniel had taken him so close to the edge with the blow job that his coming from this was a foregone conclusion. He wondered, idly, with an edge of his mind that wasn't consumed with the feel of Daniel's skin under his palms, Daniel's cock pressing in, opening him, touching him so deeply, if Daniel would come when he did or if Daniel would choose to wait.

The muscles of Daniel's shoulders and upper arms bunched and moved and swelled under Jack's touch. Jack moved against him as he could, his range constrained by Daniel's arm around his knee, by the angle at which Daniel weighed him down. A new twisty spark of arousal went through him as he tested those edges, the delicious feeling of knowing he was in Daniel's hands now, that he'd come when Daniel decided to make him, that Daniel would fuck him to orgasm and all he had to do was go along for the ride.

"Jack," Daniel was saying. "Jack, Jack," over and over, like a chant. Calling his name, saying it into the darkness.

"Got you," Jack murmured, holding tight. "I got you....."

And then he couldn't talk any more, because Daniel angled his thrusts to take advantage of the magic little gland, though Daniel got really pouty when Jack teasingly called it that out loud, and Jack's words fled in a tide of love and release and relief. When reality reorganized itself, Jack knew that he'd dropped his own hands, and his chin was tilted up toward the ceiling, and Daniel had given him more of his weight, fucking him harder now as Daniel pushed himself to his own shaking, tightly held completion. When he came, he said Jack's name.

Jack raised his noodly arms and held Daniel close as Daniel, controlled even now, slid his arm free and settled, one limb at a time, half atop Jack, his lips on Jack's neck right under his ear.

Jack smiled, and let himself drift into a doze.

He was aware of Daniel getting up, later, of the faint tranquil sound of water running, and he drifted up from that awareness to find he'd rolled into the warm space where Daniel's body had been and turned to his side. He was sticky in places, deliciously slick in others, and possessed of an inarticulate, deep sense of happiness that would soon transform itself into his usual backdrop of contentment. Jack let himself sigh, long and relaxed, and then he stretched and got up. He wiped his stomach with his discarded undershirt and dug a pair of pajama bottoms out of a drawer.

The house was silent except for the tick of the warming oven. Daniel had put the chicken and rice from the night before back in the oven to reheat. Jack would have plated up two servings and stuck it in the microwave. Faster, but in the end, no better and no worse. He was happy to do it Daniel's way. He noticed that the coffee maker was switched on, as well.

Daniel was on the back patio again, standing just behind their chairs, holding the now-corked bottle of Blanton's, looking at the rising moon as it began to clear the trees.

Jack put a hand on his shoulder. He reached down and picked up the abandoned glass of bourbon from the table. No errant insects had drowned in it while they were indoors. Daniel glanced at him and slid an arm around his waist. He hadn't put his glasses on. He was wearing boxers. He shivered, suddenly, in a puff of breeze. Jack leaned against him, sharing skin.

Daniel observed, "You have no way of knowing if the brainwashing is the same as before, or how in the hell reversing it would work, with the bodies swapped."

"Do what you can," Jack agreed, contemplating the remaining bourbon. Daniel knew what he meant by that. Daniel wasn't criticizing his orders. They just thought out loud like this, spoke for each other, voiced each other's concerns. Jack knew they both found it comforting.

Sometimes what they did, in their secret headquarters, watching Carter in space and all the other captains, watching Landry back at the mountain with all the teams whose history was their own -- sometimes it was enough, and sometimes it was too little, too late, and people got killed. People got lost. But what was the alternative? There wasn't one. Old news.

"And also: I'm glad you sent me," Daniel said, pressing a kiss to his cheek, a brush of soft beard, and then pulling away to fold his arms over his bare chest. "It's good to get out in the field sometimes, even though I have to say I don't miss getting bounced around in transporter beams any more, or going under cover among those pirate gangs. I thought I would miss field work, and the team, more than I do. I know how much you missed it, that first year back in Colorado after Elizabeth was relieved, and I wondered if I would miss it like that too, but, no. Getting to be here, getting to really dig into the alien linguistics now, and get back to writing things that will actually be implemented.... Well. You know all this."

"It's good to hear, though." And actually, here was another moment of unspoken doubt answered. Daniel didn't feel like a bureaucrat. He felt like a researcher again. Returned to his roots, perhaps. Jack smiled, and, thinking of Fraiser, thinking of Cassie, he tossed back the rest of the ceremonial drink Daniel had poured so many hours ago. Do what you can, for as long as you can.

"I can't believe you drank that," Daniel said, his eyebrows up.

"Waste not, want not," Jack said, lightly, making Daniel roll his eyes, and he took the bottle from Daniel and turned back toward the warm light of the kitchen. Dinner would be ready soon. They'd eat it, and then they'd go back to bed, and tomorrow would bring ... whatever. Maybe they'd find Rush. Maybe Telford would recover. Daniel's hand cupped his waist, slid to caress his ass as Daniel turned with him to go inside to serve up the leftovers.

Jack could live with that.


End file.
